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In February 2003, Ed Caldecott tore the sheet from his bed at Eton and painted "The Eton George Orwell Society" on it. On a wintery Saturday, he and 40 other boys, accompanied by their politics master, took the train to London where they became a small but conspicuous part of the biggest street protest in British history.
The Etonians' banner showed how up to two million people who crammed into central London to oppose the looming war in Iraq were not the usual suspects. And the route taken by the old Etonians in the decade since also illustrates one powerful legacy of the anti-war march that was so blithely ignored by Tony Blair: profound disillusionment.
"I remember at the time everyone saying, 'The baby-boomers sat around and smoked pot, our generation is different – we're going to do something,'" says Caldecott, who is now 27 and runs his own publishing business. "I was studying 1848 and the Spanish civil war and in this naive way we thought we were entering one of those big moments, and we weren't. We just felt so betrayed."
For some, 15 February 2003 will go down in history as the final moment that Britons demonstrated a touching faith in parliamentary democracy.
Henna Malik, a sixth-former at the time, painted her face with the Stop the War logo and took the train to Waterloo with her friends. She believed the millions chanting "George Bush, terrorist" would persuade their MPs to vote against the war. "It was incredibly empowering at the time," she says. When most MPs and the government ignored this will of the people, Malik became a revolutionary socialist; now she does not support any political party but is training to be a human rights lawyer. "In retrospect we didn't stop the war so I became quite disillusioned but it did shape my political beliefs and how I felt I fit within society," she says.
It was an epic day of protest by people who didn't usually do that sort of thing. "There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice). They won 2-0, by the way," as Euan Ferguson memorably noted in the Observer the next day. As night fell, Jesse Jackson and Charles Kennedy made rousing speeches and Ms Dynamite sung in Hyde Park.
It was also a global protest – there were three million on the streets of Rome and anything between 10 and 30 million in cities around the world – and it completely failed. The British march, and public opinion (a poll that weekend put opposition to a war at 52% with only 29% in favour) was dismissed by most MPs and Blair's government: 29 days later, the invasion of Iraq began. So does the demo have any historical importance?
"People feel very disappointed by it but the only way you could say it failed is if people now said the Iraq war was right and Tony Blair was right after all," says Lindsey German, convener of the Stop the War Coalition. "OK, we didn't stop that war but we kept that anti-war opinion together." German is convinced the anti-war movement had a lasting impact on what we know about the war (without protest there would have been less of the scrutiny that exposed the sham of WMDs), on British public opinion (more sceptical of other wars) and on politicians. "It makes it much, much harder for them now to do it again. Look at what Cameron says now over Mali or Syria or Libya – 'It's not going to be like Iraq.'"
The government's dismissal of the anti-war march bred both apathy and new activism. Dr Stephen Cullen, the Eton politics master, said: "It's a very bad legacy for parliamentary democracy. You think more recently about sleaze and expenses but the lies that we were told and the dismissive way in which Blair dealt with the British people is a bad thing for democracy." At least, he says, the march is "a historical alibi for the British people" although that might not mean much "if you've had your arms blown off in Iraq".
Some former pupils feel the same. "It was really devastating that it was ignored, and ignored in such a cynical way," says Caldecott. "It was really disastrous for democracy and led to a huge disengagement."
The idealism of the boys from Eton's George Orwell Society may always have been destined to wither but their experience is typical of many of their generation. Caldecott has been on a few marches since, including some Occupy protests, until he realised getting arrested could jeopardise his business. "I couldn't put myself on the line like I used to but also, what's the point? You've got Margaret Hodge giving Amazon and Google a grilling in the select committee but where does it get us? That sense of political emasculation goes all the way back to the anti-war march."
Hilary Wainwright, founding editor of Red Pepper, went on the anti-Vietnam war demos of the 1960s which influenced Harold Wilson's decision not to send troops in support of the Americans. Those much smaller protests, she says, had a constructive impact within a political system where the Labour party tolerated dissent and independent-minded MPs listened – in stark contrast to the anti-war march. "We saw there were mechanisms for political change within the system [after the 60s protests]. Now there's no longer that sense that movements trigger parliamentary change."
The government's refusal to listen to the anti-war march was "such a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional democracy" that Wainwright believes it shaped a "strong and growing" taste for direct action – not just UK Uncut and Occupy but local direct actions against the privatisation or closure of libraries and services, most notably the Lewisham hospital protests. Demonstration is more part of daily life now, agrees German. "It isn't only because of the anti-war movement but part of a general trend that people are less inclined to believe politicians and more inclined to take actions of their own."
Shamiul Joarder, 32, is typical of a younger generation who were roused by the anti-war march. "Before the march, most of my friends were saying, 'Politics is nonsense, it doesn't make a difference, don't get involved,'" he remembers. Nevertheless, he went along as a volunteer steward and it changed his life, "in terms of being conscious of being part of the world and the responsibility you have".
The failure of politicians to listen to street protest did not destroy Joarder's determination to seek change through existing political structures. He is still involved with Stop the War Coalition while working for Friends of Al-Aqsa, an NGO for Palestinian human rights. "You can't go to one protest and think that things are going to change for ever. You can't email your MP once. We have to engage in a long-term process," he says.
Like Wainwright, Ken Livingstone was fired up by the anti-Vietnam protests but by 2003 he was London mayor. Did the turnout cause him to worry about overcrowding and public safety? "My worry was that we might not get as many as the Countryside Alliance march to save fox-hunting [in 2002]. I was over the moon that it was bigger," he says.
The long-term impact of the march was that "it ended up with Blair being driven out of office" thinks Livingstone. "It revealed the bankruptcy of this new Labour nonsense that they were listening and in touch. The only person they were listening to was George Bush." Another, less obvious legacy, argues Livingstone, is Labour's leader: Ed Miliband's declaration that Iraq was a mistake was the defining point of his victory over his brother, David, who initially refused to recant on Iraq.
Tariq Ali spoke at the protest 10 years ago. "I didn't quite tell them 'Blair is going to go to war regardless of today' but I knew that," he says. He is dismissive of the idea that it was the day many ordinary people stopped believing in parliamentary democracy. "If people had lost faith in parliamentary democracy they would have stopped voting. The fact that so many people voted for new Labour at the next election shows that the majority didn't."
It may have been the first time many people took to the streets but for most it was also the last. "When they couldn't stop the war, most of them never came out again. There was a sense of frustration but it did not lead anywhere," says Ali. "It was a huge show of anger but that's about it. It left no lasting legacy in my opinion. We live in a world that is so totally dominated by capitalism it's not really surprising. This is what we are now left with – celebrating anniversaries."
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